I was getting ready to drive to Philadelphia when my phone buzzed with a text message at 8:32 on Saturday morning: “You MUST look at the cover of The Washington Post Magazine.” Being neither a subscriber nor a fan of buying the Sunday paper a day early, I wondered what my friend Kino found so riveting that it needed my attention right away. Then there was a second text message from him: “A woman who knows nothing about baseball, and could not care less, sets out to make herself a fan in a single season.” My curiosity was piqued, so I scrounged up a dollar and some change and walked up the street to Starbucks. I was so eager to read the magazine that I handed the money over to the barista as quickly as possible and was barely out the door before I started ripping open that yellow plastic to reach the magazine that was on top. And then I saw it… the pink glove on an outstretched arm above a field of regular-looking, leather models. I cringed, and I felt the color rise to my face. I tucked the magazine back in the folds of the paper and stormed back to my house. I tried to read bits and pieces of the article on my way to Philly, but I could only get through a few paragraphs before my blood pressure would spike and I’d have to put it down. Clearly it was something I would have to save until later when I had something throwable within reach.
For those readers not in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, Sydney Trent’s cover story, entitled "The Gal of Summer" and deemed “The Experiment” chronicles her mission to become a baseball fan, particularly a Washington Nationals fan, in one season. Starting with Spring Training 2006 and ending on the second to last game of the year, Trent immersed herself in the facts, figures, and fantasy world that is baseball so that she could have a greater understanding of the sport that so captivated her husband and many of those around her. In one way, I admire Trent’s experiment because it’s certainly not a short one. Eight months of the year are consumed with baseball, so to jump into that ocean willingly is a feat many non-fans would shy away from. Furthermore, it would have been much easier to crack the fan base of a team that has already achieved a modicum of success, but instead she chose to follow the Nationals, a team that is trying to move past the shadows of its recent history while at the same time trying to make a new city fall in love with them. Trent took up that challenge, and I respect that. As a female baseball fan though, I don’t agree with many of the statements she made. Ultimately this is a personal story of how Trent perceived baseball and how she strived to change that perception. My problem lies in people thinking that Trent’s perceptions are somehow the norm for all women.
I won’t deny that women experience baseball, or any sport, differently from men. Trent’s quote from Dick Ebersol is right on the money. He said that women “ ‘want an attachment, a rooting interest.’ ” Bottom line, women want backstory. Perhaps it’s part of that maternal instinct to care and nurture; perhaps it’s because women seem to be more detail-oriented whereas men look for the big picture. Whatever it is, women view sports through a different lens. However, that’s only one aspect of our experience with the game. It’s not all about the warm and fuzzy feelings; it’s also about competition and performance. Last year, I bought a Ryan Zimmerman t-shirt. I vividly remember reading an article in The Washington Post in January 2006 about Zimmerman and his family, with a particular focus on his mother who suffers from Multiple Sclerosis. It tugged at my heartstrings because Zimmerman is clearly a young man who cares deeply for his family, and that appealed to me. I realized he was someone I could really root for. That said, there was another reason I liked Zimmerman. He’s a good baseball player. I was there when he hit the walk-off homer against the Marlins on the 4th of July last year. He’s actually more than good. He’s sensational, a franchise player, and that’s why I like sporting his jersey around town, not because he’s an all-around swell guy. I know lots of guys like that, but none whose last name I’d slap on the back of a t-shirt. I wear his number 11 because he’s a strong competitor in the game I love. Women may enjoy forming an attachment to athletes, but the raw, physical dynamics of the game still capture our attention as much as it does with male fans.
Elsewhere in her article, Trent discusses her husband’s use of the rally cap, a widely-held superstition that has been credited with many a comeback. She writes, “I’m finding these particular male rituals are rather, well, cute.” With one statement, she not only set up baseball fandom to be a giant fraternity, but also minimized the precious superstitions of the game by calling them “cute.” In terms of the former, we can all agree that professional baseball is a game played by men. There have been one or two young women who have cracked the enclave by playing minor league ball, but overall, it’s a man’s game. However, being a baseball fan is not, and the ritual of the rally cap or any other superstition is not limited to men and men alone. My own attire and any potential or existing jinxes (i.e. my refusal to wear a new Red Sox t-shirt for the rest of 2006 after I attended their September loss at Camden Yards) are regular topics of conversation in my house. I’m a level-headed person who balances her checkbook down to the penny, but I can look you dead in the eye and say these rituals, these superstitions, these traditions are real. And what’s more? They’re fun. These little quirks only add to the spirit and the experience of being at the ballpark, so they are neither “cute,” nor exclusively male.
Though I don’t agree with much in Trent’s article, what incensed me the most probably had little to do with her and more to do with The Washington Post’s decision to place a woman’s arm with a pink glove on the front, while printing the title of the magazine in a brilliant shade of the same color. Pink has its place in the world, but it does not belong in sports, and I resent its rampant use as the defining symbol of women’s involvement. This sentiment reached its peak when I saw a pink White Sox World Series cap enshrined in a glass case in Cooperstown. My problem with the hat was not so much the color, as much as the fact that owners, marketers, designers, and any of the powers-that-be think it’s the only way to get women interested in sports. Just throw out some pastels and we’ll come a-runnin’. It doesn’t work that way. When it became popular for men to get manicures, did the technicians whip out blue files and blue nail clippers? Somehow I doubt it. Using pink as the go-to color for anything sports related makes women look shallow and ignorant, as if we’re not capable of wearing the appropriate team colors, but women are capable of seeing much more in sports than color coordination.
Perhaps the most stunning line of all in Trent’s story was, “I know plenty of female sports fans, but I don’t know one who gets truly bent out of shape after a lost game.” I read that line after I returned from Philadelphia, where incidentally I had gone to see the Red Sox versus the Phillies in the final spring training game. My friend Izzie and I sat 22 rows from the field, in cute, women’s cut, Sox gear… i.e. no pink… cheering for our team, so you can certainly imagine why I would have been stymied reading that line after road-tripping specifically to see baseball. Trent followed up her statement, admitting, “But maybe they do.” You better believe they do. There are female fans like my friend and I who jump up when a player homers and those like us who wallow in a funk the day after a grueling loss. There are women who have a symbiotic relationship with their teams and to assume that they don’t exist is short-sighted.
Just as my frustration was reaching a high, it dawned on me. As easily as Trent could say that she doesn’t know any women who get upset after a team loses, I was on the verge of making an equally sweeping remark, saying that I don’t believe there are women who don’t care about sports. Having grown up playing and watching sports, I find this hard to fathom, but I know they are out there. Maybe I’m a bit of a baseball snob to assume that everyone gets the game, loves the game, and feels the game the same way that I do, and that if they don’t, then there’s something wrong with them. So after vowing to write a rebuttal to set the record straight on how women truly feel about the game, I realized that ultimately it was just another personal story of one woman’s perception of baseball and that perception is mine.
Both Sydney Trent and I are coming from different ends of the spectrum, and while there’s nothing wrong with either, I want people to know that both sides exist. I still stand by my repudiation of the color pink in sports, saying that it undermines female fans and the female population as a whole and I still don’t appreciate the condescension in describing the trappings of the game, but I can appreciate one very important fact, which is that every woman is entitled to her own sports point of view.
